kalamazoo

November 17th, 2023 at 8:11 PM ^

Dude says at 3pm he has been working already 14 hours? Yikes.

700 individuals = 500 volunteers for charities + 200 paid

7 games, 12 hours, $30-$50/hr

Chefs or not (and that includes the food for suites). Job well done. 👏 

Joined: 08/20/2010

MGoPoints: 2566

ButlerGoBlue

November 17th, 2023 at 8:16 PM ^

This isn't about a false news report, a suspension, someone get fired, Harbaugh leaving to the NFL, or any other slow drip drip of pain. Silly you thinking people would want to watch something fun and enjoyable. 

They talk about $1m per game in revenue from the food but where the real money is made is in the cath lab at the hospital from the 10,000 hot dogs served per game!

Thank you for posting!

Joined: 05/07/2011

MGoPoints: 1089

Perkis-Size Me

November 17th, 2023 at 8:23 PM ^

Their efforts are to be commended, but serving up overpriced hot dogs, microwaveable nacho cheese, pretzels and popcorn doesn’t grant you the title of chef.

Doesn’t mean they’re not hard working. And I don’t know if they’re catering the suites / club section so maybe the food is better up there, but I’ve had enough of the food in general seating to say that’s not made by a chef. That’s made by a vendor.

And that’s perfectly okay. But don’t piss in my cup and tell me it’s lemonade.

Joined: 11/30/2011

MGoPoints: 105756

JonnyHintz

November 17th, 2023 at 10:10 PM ^

Yeah you’d be pretty surprised to learn how many restaurants, both chains and privately owned, use the same product. A good chunk of which is just frozen, pre-prepared food. Doesn’t mean the food is bad or anything, but it seems like most people are expecting food made from scratch when they go out to eat and that’s just not the reality. 

Joined: 01/11/2015

MGoPoints: 48401

MgoBlaze

November 18th, 2023 at 3:12 AM ^

Yeah, there's a huge disconnect between what people think of as food and what's served at restaurants, especially casual ones. Most places are too lazy to make their own mashed potatoes. I will go ahead and disagree with you by saying that in general, getting premade frozen food in is bad, but I've always had ridiculously high food standards and there's a reason that I work in Michelin-level fine dining.

After working in restaurants from the age of 16, mostly in kitchens but also in the front of the house, I can generally tell by looking at a menu if a restaurant is going to be yet another peddler of mass-produced slop. If I never taste that godawful mockery of "pulled pork" from the white plastic bucket again it'll be too soon. Same goes for powdered demi-glace, frozen soups and mashed potatoes that come in plastic bags, and about 50 other things.

A GFS or Sysco truck outside of a place is a red flag, albeit one of varying size. Some places buy nothing but plastic wrap, aluminum foil, butter (Plugra, in Sysco's case) and cleaning supplies from them, nothing wrong with that. Others have their menus written and their ordering done entirely by their reps, in which case the outlook on getting a half-decent meal is... bleak.

The biggest red flag is a hodgepodge of different cuisines- if a place has Buffalo wings, egg rolls, burritos, cheesecake, and burgers on the menu the odds are very high that all of them come in frozen, likely even precooked. Thus, the odds are high that the place serving them puts as little thought and effort into what they do as possible. A beer list of only American macros served from draft lines that have never been cleaned, cocktails made with mixers that don't need refrigeration, and a wine list of Cupcake, Bread and Butter, and Kendall Jackson means that mediocrity will be the absolute best that place is capable of.

Small menus with transparent sourcing are green flags. Most chefs of any level that are worth their proverbial salt will create a small menu of things local farmers do well that they can focus on consistently executing.

Joined: 07/12/2020

MGoPoints: 2668

Wendyk5

November 18th, 2023 at 8:55 AM ^

I'm a former pastry chef, and my first job out of cooking school was working in a high end bakery. Bakeries are notorious for using commercial mixes for just about everything. We made everything from scratch, even the cake layers. Used recipes that you use at home, scaled up by 100. As a result, I'm super picky about bakeries and won't go to places that use mixes or canned glazes or premade anything. You can always tell. 

Joined: 11/20/2008

MGoPoints: 67787

JonnyHintz

November 18th, 2023 at 10:47 AM ^

All of the food distribution companies have their mix of quality food and the mass produced, pre-made mixtures. Simply forming an opinion based on the truck in front isn’t accurate. 
 

I’ve packed trucks for customers that were purchasing fresh-cut meats, fresh produce, potatoes, etc. On the same truck, for a different customer, I’d be packing frozen burgers, buns, chicken, and pre-packaged mashed potatoes. 
 

It’s entirely up to the customer and their preferences. Some are interested in producing high quality dining and preparing their own food for the customers and others are looking for cheap food for maximum profit margins. As consumers, we just have to understand that you’re not going to get a fine-dining experience with top of the line food at every restaurant. If you’re going to a diner, you’re going to get diner food. If you’re going to a top of the line steakhouse, you’re more than likely getting quality fresh meats. 
 

In the case of the University of Michigan, we’re talking about feeding tens of thousands of students daily and stuffing 110,000 into the stadium on Saturdays. High quality isn’t at the top of their priority list. 

Joined: 01/11/2015

MGoPoints: 48401

MgoBlaze

November 18th, 2023 at 2:10 PM ^

Yes, all foodservice companies have products for people to use when they want to cut corners qualitywise and be lazy at the cost of making food taste good. The company that's selling it does make a difference due to things like storage conditions, rep competence, the companies they work with, etc. But Sysco reps have been particularly aggressive with trying to get people to switch from making things in-house to their cheap facsimiles of food, so that company gets my ire.

However, if anyone is buying produce from Sysco, that's an enormous red flag. They're not buying from local farms with an eye to quality, they're supporting other large, faceless corporations and shipping things like tomatoes from Guatemala in February. That's what farms exist for, and they're literally all over the country. They're who restaurants should be calling for produce. Not to mention milk, eggs, and meat.

There's a reason you never see Gordon Ramsay (who I've worked for) go anywhere on Kitchen Nightmares and say "We need to get rid of all of this fresh, locally sourced food and replace it with stuff that was made by machines four months ago and frozen."

I've run roughly a dozen restaurants, all without anything from Sysco or GFS. I vehemently disagree with you that acceptable "diner food" is or should be frozen, premade slop. There's nothing stopping a diner from grinding their own beef to make burgers, baking their own buns, using fresh vegetables, and otherwise having some semblance of quality standards except laziness and a bad business model. Diners don't have to be purveyors of food that tastes like sadness, but the Syscos and the GFS's of the world enable their laziness and greed so that's the status quo.

A "fine dining experience" doesn't mean that the cooks make everything possible from scratch in-house. That's just the minimum standards of a respectable restaurant. There are reasons that Zingerman's is massively successful and Chili's isn't, and they're sourcing, a lack of laziness, attention to detail, and a lack of greed. Standards keep restaurants in business.

Joined: 07/12/2020

MGoPoints: 2668

JonnyHintz

November 18th, 2023 at 9:42 PM ^

The entire business-model of diners essentially requires them to cut those “quality” corners. They’re designed for their food to be cheap. Buying higher quality food/ingredients costs more money. Having the staff grind their own beef and bake their own buns isn’t cost efficient within their model. That’s going to turn into higher menu pricing which in turn drives their clientele away (who is gonna go to a diner and pay the same prices as a steakhouse?). You’re not getting a freshly ground burger with a freshly baked bun and hand-cut french fries for $10. 
 

It’s funny you mention Gordon Ramsay and Kitchen Nightmares. I’m not discounting the guy’s knowledge of food or anything. Great chef, great businessman. But you do realize over 80% of the restaurants featured on that show have closed right? He’s going into all of these mom and pop restaurants and dinky little diners and presenting them with a business model that isn’t sustainable. Square peg, round hole. You’re talking about “maximizing profit margins originally” and these are all businesses just barely making it by as is. 

Joined: 01/11/2015

MGoPoints: 48401

MgoBlaze

November 19th, 2023 at 2:32 AM ^

I mean, yes and no. In some ways we're saying the same thing.

Diners should be relatively inexpensive, but if all diner food is the same quality then it's a simple choice for one to focus on doing one thing and doing it better than everyone else in order to stand out from the crowd. Maybe there's validity to the argument that they no longer become diners at that point, and yes maybe the idea that a large menu is arguably inherent in the definition of a diner means that some of those corners need to be cut in a diner model for it to be sustainable.

But I do think that kind of corner-cutting food only brings people in the door when there are no better options around or when people don't know better, both of which are unlikely in places with any semblance of food culture. Sure that model will work in Klansville, Arkansas, but only until something better comes along. I think the future is more in specialization.

Nowhere besides fast food places is serving a burger and fries these days for under $15, premade or not. But lets use that as an example.

Brisket, chuck, and short rib tend to run between $2-$4 per pound wholesale, the ingredients for buns cost a quarter apiece if that, and potatoes are $20ish for a 50 pound case. That's roughly $2.50 in cost for an 8oz burger with fries, up to around $3ish with cheese and LTO. Save money on fryer oil by adding in the beef fat that renders as the burgers cook.

Sell 100 of those in a day, open 5 days a week, and we're talking about $30k a month gross. That's work that one salaried cook at 40k annually could do for roughly $3300 per month. Another part timer at $18/hr and Even if the overhead is insane at like $15k per month, the profit is still consistently there and the demand is sustainable due to the quality.

That's not even including potential revenue from drinks and desserts, both of which have huge profit margins for minimal labor. That's also still far below the average steakhouse burger in cost and equal if not better in quality.

As far as Ramsay, you're right in some ways, but even taking one out of five restaurants that's alienated their customer base with years of subpar food and service and/or endangered them by serving things that should have been handled while wearing a hazmat suit and turning it around is impressive. He's giving them a sustainable business model (simple, fresh, and local is always a winner), but most of the time after he leaves they go right back to the corner cutting that got them in their predicament in the first place, just with the show's renovations.

Joined: 07/12/2020

MGoPoints: 2668

Ray

November 17th, 2023 at 8:47 PM ^

Thank you for posting this.  As a business and ops geek it was edifying and a welcome distraction.  

And the sound track was the best!

Joined: 07/05/2008

MGoPoints: 7044

treetown

November 17th, 2023 at 9:22 PM ^

The comments show different viewpoints of commercial cooking. Many decry the use of the world chef because of the nature of the food (e.g. hot dogs, burgers, etc.). The sheer scope of the task and the time pressure makes the title worthwhile. Most of the top chefs in the world are not just excellent cooks, but good managers. 

Joined: 11/10/2010

MGoPoints: 6339

MgoBlaze

November 18th, 2023 at 3:51 AM ^

Two things:

First, the definition of the word "chef" has expanded and become much more amorphous than it was even 20 years ago. Julia Child, iirc, said that a chef was just someone who runs a professional kitchen. That's the definition that I generally go with, though at the same time I wouldn't use the term to describe someone in charge of an operation like concessions at The Big House because that's less of a kitchen than a food production facility. There are cooks and managers there, but the extent to which a place that serves scrambled eggs from a bag can be called a kitchen is questionable. Does anyone call the people in charge of prison food chefs?

Then all of a sudden Food Network came along and started calling people that have never run a kitchen like Jamie Oliver and Rachael Ray chefs and now anyone with a Shun knife and an instagram account calls themself a chef.

Second, you'd be shocked to learn how terrible at managing many of the old French chefs were. The stuff you see Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White doing on TV is tame.

Robuchon, of his 32 Michelin stars, was straight up sadistic; there are hundreds of horror stories of people working for him and him pushing people down stairs, locking them in coolers, throwing hot plates of food on cooks' faces (I believe he threw a plate of lobster ravioli on Gordon Ramsay's face), and generally being an awful human being. (https://www.eater.com/2015/2/6/7991907/joel-robuchon-restaurant-harassment) That's not rare- I've worked for quite a few chefs who only communicated by screaming with only the occasional respite of sexually harrassing the female servers.

Joined: 07/12/2020

MGoPoints: 2668

leftrare

November 17th, 2023 at 11:41 PM ^

Chef?  Give me a break. Maybe up in the Victors club he can think of himself as a chef. But cold food and cold chocolate milk sold as “hot cocoa” is not something a Chef serves. 

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 3213